Tag Archives: obamacare

Zane Tankel, a wealthy owner of over 40 Applebee franchises has attracted media attention by denouncing Obamacare and claiming that it will impose such burdensome expenses on him that he will need to fire workers, limit the hours of existing workers so that they are part-time and do not qualify for health insurance coverage, and cancel plans to open new restaurants. The media reaction has understandably focused on the public rage at such a wealthy man throwing his workers under the bus. I write to make a different point. Tankel illustrates some of the reasons why the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) projections of a purported U.S. financial crisis arising from the safety net are baseless.

Over the past couple of years there has been considerable back-and-forth over what has been accomplished by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA). While a short post cannot survey the entirety of this multifaceted law, several elementary confusions have been repeated in public discussions and should be addressed in the interest of clarification. The most urgent of these is to point out that, despite the Act’s (deliberately misleading?) title, it addresses neither the practice of medicine nor its cost. At most a government-sponsored institute has been authorized to find and make suggestions. The Act, then, is not about making health care affordable, but an effort to make health-care insurance affordable – a related but separate topic. To understand the implications of this, we must consider the business of health insurance.